Back home now after an exhausting but stimulating couple of days at GTAUK, and time for me to try and distill/synthesise/replay all the stuff I've learned. It's a necessary part of the process for me, this 'letting the dust settle'. I'm dreadful at taking notes because I just get too engrossed in what's being discussed to think beyond the moment and plan for the future. Luckily, I've got a number of safety notes this time: the indefatigable live posting of a number of the tweeps in the room, the reflections of others later, and the copious amounts of support material provided by the GTA team themselves. I am really looking forward to trawling the 600 pages that Dana Nguyen (@heydana) has put together over the past year because I think she may just have answered the questions I get hit with all the time by network admins, LEA VLE people and resistant teachers. I can't tell you what a relief it was to me to find that Google was not only aware of the issues but has addressed them energetically, both in terms of technical solutions and support material.
It made me feel that - just perhaps - we might have got the timing right on this stuff, and that the investment that we've made in our little school in constructing our GApps-based VLE (although the right word is probably 'assembling' since Google tools are more Lego than Meccano - thanks to Doug for that insight!) will prove to be justified. Reassurance came from another source, too, since I was fully expecting those in the room more seasoned than I am in the strengths and weaknesses of the commercial VLEs to weigh in with reasons why the approach we've adopted is flawed, but that just didn't happen: perhaps they found the arguments advanced by Kern Kelley (@kernkelly), Dana and others to be as compelling as I did. I was expecting, for example, Ian Addison (@ianaddison) to sound a healthy note of caution since he knows his VLE as well as anybody can, but his candid
blog post this evening suggests that perhaps his views on the matter have been shaken up a bit too, and I suspect others in the room who are associated with one VLE supplier or another feel the same way. That's a good thing for all of us from time to time, surely?
I was going to list the memorable moments I can recall in my brain-addled state, but the truth is that there are just too many: Jesstern Rays (@jessternrays) got it right when he said that we weren't learning one new thing a day or an hour, it was practically one new thing a minute - and for hour after hour after hour, too. What I think I'll do eventually is list some of the real-world applications that people showed us - the ways they've used this stuff in the classroom. There were dozens of great examples, so even there I'll have to wait for my brain to de-fizz a bit - I'll have to wait for the dust to settle.
It's just that for once, just as in Philip Pullman's 'His Dark Materials' trilogy, every grain of this dust is golden. Plus I get to ride into battle on the back of an armoured polar bear - how cool is that?
Enormous thanks to everybody who made it such a memorable and invaluable experience.
Mark Allen
@edintheclouds
